52+ years and leave when the market dries out is a pretty good run, though.
Sigh makes a man feel old. I remember just a few years ago in the mid/late 20teens from the AirTrain at JFK, seeing on the apron still visible the “shadow” of where WorldPort once stood. Of all the awful old in-need-of-demolition terminals at JFK it was the only one that made me think, “damn shame”.
May I say, though, a whole bunch of other legacy carriers were also floating around the idea of SSTs and Jumbos that they never really should have even tried (Branniff actually co-registered a coupe of Concordes with BA/AF for a year and a half for flights into DFW). And PanAm carried on into 1991, which was not that bad for one of the carriers that could not adapt to deregulation.
Yeah I laughed at that. Before, I’d leave from home or the office for DCA 45 min before my posted flight time and still have time for a snack in the lounge. Takes longer to get to Union Station and board a train.
Some cities are better or worse than others, so obviously YMMV. IAD is a different beast. And for international travel, we’re talking IAD.
Ah, yes NZ1/NZ2. I flew that a couple of times back in the 1990s on 747s, right at the tail end of the era when being able to take a long-haul flight somewhere in the first place was still a Big Deal.
I’ve always been a bit saddened that with Concorde and the Tu-144 (Yes, I know it was terrible) out of service, supersonic passenger travel isn’t an option anymore.
Having said that, given the changes in global power structures since the 1960s, I wouldn’t have thought there’d be a huge demand for a supersonic trans-Atlantic jet these days. I mean, it only takes 7 hours to fly from New York to London, which really isn’t that big a deal in an era when you can basically binge-watch Netflix/movies or play video games on your laptop/tablet the whole time.
Where I can see supersonic travel being worthwhile is the really long-haul stuff; the UK/US-to-Australia/NZ/Japan/China routes where being able to do the flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo in five hours instead of 11 actually would make a difference and there’d be plenty of people willing to pay for that.
As others have mentioned, Concorde was severely cost-inefficient due to the limitations of the technology of the time, plus restrictions on where it could operate due to sonic booming.
Newer generation planes shouldn’t have that problem.
I don’t know that this will automatically beat a path toward profitability. But I suspect the consumer niche here is very-wealthy individuals who would prefer to travel supersonically, but don’t want to pony up for an entire supersonic aircraft.
To me, in long-haul travel, I can tolerate 2 out of 3 of: expense, discomfort, and lost time. The US-Europe haul (about 9 hours) is right on the boundary of “who cares how long it is, I’ll just take a nap”. South America, even more tolerable due to less jet lag. US-Japan is… horrendous, but barely tolerable and barely affordable. But I simply can’t manage India or Australia. Can’t afford it, wouldn’t want to sit through it, would spend too large a proportion of time sitting on a plane.
But if I could cut the travel duration in half for an extra $5000-$10000, now I am able to consider a trip like India, Africa, or Australia every 5 years or so. I bet there are many people wealthier than me who feel similarly but have a lot more disposable wealth.
It’s unlikely the USAF would fly POTUS in it, but it’s a not hard to see how supersonic jet that can carry cargo and/or passengers would be useful for them. The military isn’t going to worry about causingsonic booms if they need to fly over land. And Boom is much closer to reality than using SpaceX’s Starship for point-to-point suborbital transport.
Interestingly, the part above that I wrote myself in quote tags doesn’t count towards Discourse’s minimum thread length, so I’m adding this sentence to make @discobot’s robo-minions happy.
Actually, military booms are VERY restricted over land.
There are just a few designated and largely uninhabited areas where booms are permitted at all, and every single boom in those areas must be logged by the crew upon return for reporting to USAF HQ.
Booms elsewhere are a very quick ticket to meeting your great-grandboss for an ass-chewing.
There is an exception for emergency interceptions by dedicated interceptor forces of course. But those too are logged and reported to Washington.
The idea that fast jets on ordinary missions can boom with impunity is simply inaccurate.
I understand, but the military isn’t going to be flying the Boom on ordinary missions. Training and testing? Those don’tneed to done over inhabited land.
Flight test ranges like those associated with Edwards AFB are among the
so this is a reasonable assertion. Although, as a testing program, any test flight that might generate a boom would have been planned and logged in advance. Unexpected boom, or unexpected lack of boom, would be a notable incident from test team’s perspective.
Then I totally misunderstood your earlier post. Sorry.
I thought you were suggesting DoD would buy a bunch of Booms to use as transports and routinely fly supersonic wherever they want because, after all, we’re the DoD, who’s gonna stop us?
As to testing: unless the military is buying some, it’s unlikely they’ll have much, if any, role in the test program leading to the Boom’s FAA certification. There is plenty of civilian airspace offshore where civilian companies can test civilian airplanes supersonically with no regulatory hang-ups. Hasn’t been much need for that in many years, but there’s a lot of ocean out there.
I’ve been trying to do some math on this*, and I can’t possibly see how a plane that flies only 80-90 passengers is going to be able to make money on a 5,000+ mile trip from San Francisco to Tokyo or a ~7,500 mile trip from Sydney to Los Angeles.
The figures I’ve seen for flying a basic 737 are as low as 7.5 cents per passenger mile.** Doubling that to 15 cents per passenger mile for a Boom works out to less than $34,000 for a 5,000 mile trip. Dividing that by 90 passengers equals about $378 per passenger. So much for the $100 fares.
An Embraer E-190 E2, which carries about the same number of passengers as the BOOM, has a maximum range of about 3,300 miles and a maximum fuel load of 30,200 pounds or roughly 4,500 gallons. Multiply that by 1.5 for a 5,000 mile trip and you get 45,300 pounds. That’s more than 1/3 the maximum takeoff weight of the E2. By contrast, the 737 Max family seems to get by on maximum fuel being 25-30% of maximum takeoff weight.
Can Boom possibly be so fuel efficient that it can go 1.5x as far and twice as fast on the same amount of fuel as an E2? Will it have to reduce payload to carry more fuel? Increase the overall size of the aircraft just to carry enough fuel for 90 passengers, increasing the cost? Make a refueling stop instead of a non-stop flight? Or will Boom turn out to be as cost-inefficient as the Concorde?
As always, when I try to do math, I have a God-given ability to screw up large numbers, so feel free to nitpick my calculations.
** I know. Operating costs depend heavily on fuel costs. I have no idea if 7.5 cents is still a valid number for a 737, or what the current cost of jet fuel is. Also, note that Boom says they will use sustainable aviation fuel, with no details about the potential cost or energy capacity of that fuel.
Perhaps more immediately to the point is that airlines all kind of look the same because air and gravity are still the same. There are really only so many ways to design a device that will carry people through the sky safely, quickly and economically, and the current basic design is a really, really good way of doing it. (I am sure there is some reason why airliners with engines in the rear, like the MD-80, aren’t a thing anymore.)
Externally, an iPhone 13 doesn’t look much different from an iPhone 3, either. It’s a WAY more advanced device though.
As to the value of supersonic flight, I think part of the economic problem is that on most flights that people take, the time savings is incredibly minimal. Supersonic flight has obvious benefits if I’m going from LA to Tokyo; an aircraft pushing Mach 2 will hack six hours off the flight time. If I want to go from LA to Sydney, it’d cut off eight hours.
But the VAST majority of flights don’t go that far. They’re flights like Frankfurt to London, or Toronto to Atlanta, or Hong Kong to Quanzhou-Jinjiang. On flight like that you might save thirty minutes to an hour. The passenger is spending more time driving to the airport, parking, and futzing around in the airport than they spend on the plane. If I need a flight from Cape Town to Perth I sure as hell would like to slash 7-8 hours off my flight, but if I’m going Cape Town to Windhoek, my interest in saving MAYBE an hour is not going to motivate me to give you a lot more money for that flight. I’m happy paying three of four hundred bucks instead of $1500 to save one hour.
A major inter-continental airline would certainly find some demand for those quicker flights, but you’re adding not very many planes to your fleet, so it’s a bit of a hard sell for the manufacturer, and your regional airlines that specialize in shorter trips may have no demand for this at all. Boeing and Airbus do not want to build a plane that few airlines want few of. They want planes that appeal for really massive sales. Something like the A350 is useful on any route.
One of the central challenges w SSTs is that right now the shortest flight that gives really revolutionary improvements in trip time is near the ragged edge of maximum range of the machines being designed.
It’s always easier to design more range into a larger machine. But this is also a nascent market where the expectation is that the “I (almost) don’t care what it costs” crowd are your only plausible customers, at least for first gen SSTs. That militates towards a small airplane with a few luxo seats, not a large cattle-car carrying hundreds of price-sensitive shoppers.
Squaring all those circles is a tough job. 50 years ago with Concorde the lines did not cross in a viable business case. Or at least they built a machine to target a spot where the lines didn’t cross profitably. There probably was no such profitable point back then.
Perhaps there is now a spot on the graph where the lines cross profitably. I’m cautiously optimistic there is. And equally sorta-optimistic that Boom or folks like them are targeting that spot. We shall see.
I mean, right now with the restrictions, even a modern SST would still be subsonic over land, so flying from say… Houston to London would be around half subsonic, half supersonic, and would not see all that much benefit in terms of time. But if you could take off, get to altitude, and go Mach 1.8 all the way, significant time savings could be achieved. Same thing for coast-to-coast flights or ones that are largely over land- Dallas-Anchorage, for example.
One of the operating assumptions of all the current SST designs is that they do indeed produce no meaningful boom at ground level and the current regulations against supersonic flight over land will be promptly rescinded.
What I find a bit odd is that NASA’s research is lagging behind the designs that are to the point of cutting metal soon if not already.
There are plenty of CFD and wind-tunnel data to suggest the theories behind these designs will work as planned in the real world. But until we do it for real with the real atmosphere, real topography, and a real populace down below we won’t know how much the low-boom designs work from a human perspective.
Right now the SST designers are hedging their bets a bit. They expect they can control boom intensity well at e.g. Mach 1.5, but not so well at e.g. Mach 2.2. So their designs are rather slow within the total range of “supersonic”.
Assuming this early effort succeeds both as engineering and as economics we can expect to see faster next-gen SSTs pretty quickly. That’s “quickly” on the aerospace time scale of years to a decade-plus, not the internet timeline of months to a year-plus.
My own take is between greens, populists, and know-nothing CT theories promoted for profit by so many websites, it’s quite likely they’ll succeed engineering-wise then fail politically to get the regs changed. Oops if so.
